You cannot see them, yet you know that the second set of doors, the ones past the ticket windows, are certainly locked, and that the manager waits behind them with a key.
Yogurt Man finishes his lunch and lies against his windshield, his face turned to the sun, oblivious to the cash pickup far at his back. A white paper bag tumbles across the lot where the empty cars wait.
The armored truck sits tight, locked and idling.
* * *
THE TRUCK HAS FOUR doors-- one driver, one passenger, two rear-- and a small sixteen-by-eighteen-inch package door on the left side. An additional jump seat is in the cargo area, separated from the cab by a locked door, which sits empty on this two-man run. The doors all have special Medeco high-security key cylinders, as do the interior safes or lockboxes. The ignition key is not a special key, but a kill switch is concealed somewhere inside the front cabin, or else a series of random actions (for instance, switching on the defrost, then depressing the brake pedal, then switching on the defrost again) must be performed in sequence before the engine will turn over.
When the ignition key is turned, all doors automatically lock. When the driver's door is opened, the back doors automatically lock. If any door is unlocked, a red warning light shines over the dash and the wheels on the vehicle lock to prevent the can from moving. In addition, manual dead bolts are installed inside each door.
In a siege situation, the driver is trained to lock down and radio for help. The twelve-ton truck is a mobile bunker impervious to outside attack, its stainless steel armor designed to preserve structural integrity. Due to weight-load restrictions, the cargo area is usually armored one level lower than the cabin; for example, the cargo area might be certified to withstand an AK-47 or M14 assault, whereas the cabin could handle M16 fire. The weakest section of the cargo area, the rear door, is still three inches thick.
Windshield and window glass is a glass-clad polycarbonate, less dense than but equally effective as heavier bulletproof glass.
There is a roof-mounted beacon, a siren, and a public address system. Four eyehole gun ports are cut into the body of the truck. The heavy-duty bumpers are built to withstand a ram attack, and the tractor-size tires are puncture-resistant. The undercarriage would resemble that of any normal two-ton truck, but reinforced to carry six times that load; for example, the fifteen-inch differential unit is easily three times that of a standard vehicle.
The security and liquidity of the world's leading economy rides on these trucks, tens of thousands of them out on the streets at any hour, billions of dollars in notes and coin perpetually in transit. You know and accept that there is no practical way to compromise the hulk of an armored bank vehicle without also destroying its contents. The can is only vulnerable through its human operators.
* * *
AT 11:44, THE COURIER reappears on the front ramp, rolling the stacked dolly ahead of him, having spent nine minutes inside. You clock it.
The courier wheels the dolly to the rear of the truck. The handcart is stacked halfway up with three white canvas sacks of cash. The plastic trays below the white sacks contain rolled coins. The original blue-and-green Pinnacle canvas bag rides on top.
Inside the sacks are deposit bags containing cash and receipts. The clear plastic bags are supplied by Pinnacle and each one bears a tracking bar code. Much of the courier's nine minutes inside was spent inspecting the bags for tears, testing the seals, and reconciling the amounts printed on the deposit slips inside with the amounts on the manager's manifest.
The driver has spent this nine minutes watching the exterior perimeter. Security mirrors around the truck are specifically trained on the rear-door ambush area.
Courier and driver remain in constant audio contact, both wearing small, black wire earphones and microphones. The driver monitors the courier's conversations for warning signs and responds to his reports, such as
I'm on my way out
.
As the courier approaches the can, a small playing-card-sized parabolic mirror mounted near the door handle gives him an eye line on anyone behind him moving into the ambush zone. Two knocks and the right rear door is unlocked. He pulls it open and promptly loads the white sacks into the hold. He stows the empty dolly and shuts the door.
He walks to the passenger door, plucking out his ear wires. The side door is unlocked by the driver and the courier climbs inside. 11:46.
The truck sits for four more minutes while the driver double-checks the deposit receipts, entering bar codes into Pinnacle's tracking system.
You pull away during this time. Armored-truck guards are vigilant for tails, and a well-trained driver will spot your car driving away and make a mental note of its color and make.
You drive to the bottom of Grandview and back along Forbes to the parking lot of the Sheraton Tara. There, you and your partner switch into a work car and wait.
The can comes rolling along Forbes Road past you toward the mall. You see that the driver is a black man in his fifties. With no vehicle following him out of the parking lot of The Braintree 10, he starts to relax, falling in with the traffic, maintaining a safe and reasonable distance from the other vehicles. You pull out a few cars behind him.
The interior of the armored-truck cab is wide but unremarkable, a cross between a police cruiser and a long-haul truck. Aside from the hypnotizing drone of the engine and the occasional radio chatter, the cab is essentially soundproof. Armoring and special glass make it like driving inside a vacuum. For such a boxy, bulky, dense vehicle-- armored trucks average between three and four miles to the gallon-- the suspension is exceptionally smooth, and driver and courier feel no bumps.
Guards are often retirees from the MBTA or the Turnpike Authority, usually with a military background, earning between 65K and 90K per year. The shuttle between deliveries and pickups, or jumps, is the safest and least stressful part of their workday.
You remain two or three car lengths back from the truck, in a different lane when possible. When the can pulls into a parking lot for another pickup, you radio your freckled friend, who has been circling you in another stolen work car, and who then enters the lot and eyeballs the can. One of his talents is pretending to be asleep.
Then it is your turn to circle and wait. Your other partner, the one riding with you, unscrews the cap on the empty mayonnaise jar you brought for such eventualities and relieves himself into it. Part of you can't help but think how pleased he is at any excuse to whip out his dick in public, and how proud he must be at the duration of his piss, the singing sound it makes against the jar glass. You tolerate his satisfied sigh.
Your remote friend radios you in code, giving you the direction of the can, and you resume the tail as before.
Five more jumps. Some of them quick change orders, some pickups.
Another dozen jumps. Working your way through Holbrook, into Brockton.
Ten more. Almost four o'clock now. After a supermarket jump in downtown Brockton, the can rides west for a while, ten minutes without a stop, twenty. You know, because it is your job to know, that the Pinnacle armored-car facility is hidden behind double security fences in rural Easton up ahead. Your day's work is done. You pull off when the can gets close.
* * *
DEZ WASHED HIMSELF LIKE a marked bill in order to get free. He took a taxi from Sully Square out to Harvard Square in Cambridge, bought a ticket to a late-afternoon matinee at the Brattle Theater, sat for first fifteen minutes of a subtitled Hong Kong action movie, then carried his popcorn out through the curtained doorway at the front of the theater and exited into the side alley off Mifflin Place, sliding into Doug's waiting Caprice.
Doug had tailed Dez's taxi over from Charlestown himself. No one else followed. He kept his eye on his mirrors now, making switchbacks and U-turns just in case.
"Either they're off me," said Dez, "or they've got powers of invisibility."
"You just keep cruising that bank in Chestnut Hill," Doug told him. "Go in whenever you can and make change."
"I've eaten lunch in my truck across the street every day this week. How's the other thing coming?"
"Good. Trying to figure out what weekend now, pick a movie. Going over
Premiere
magazine's 'Summer Movie Preview' issue like it's the
Racing Form,
trying to pick a winner."
"Striptease,"
said Dez.
"I know. Demi Moore. My dick already bought a ticket. But June twenty-eighth, that's not soon enough."
"Mission: Impossible
. Theme song remade by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen."
"Yeah, Tom Cruise got my vote. But that's Memorial Day weekend. Jem wants it now, now, now."
"You don't need to rush it."
"No. But it's coming together fast on its own."
"As good as you thought?"
"Check my math. Theater's main screens seat, say, five hundred capacity. Two good afternoon matinees, plus the seven and ten p.m. shows, that's two thousand Saturday and two thousand Sunday, plus another thou Friday night. Five thousand numb asses per theater, say there's four outta ten screens running the newest movies. Just four out of the ten screens-- twenty thousand asses and mouths. Eight bucks per ass at night, five seventy-five per in the day, and then there's the food. A popcorn, Pepsi, and Goobers alone will take you up over ten dollars, but then there's a Pizzeria Uno and Taco Bell in the lobby-- with no restaurants nearby. Half a mil, easy, that's our floor, Dez. With a quarter to you for just playing decoy."
* * *
JEM'S PART WAS THE supply: weapons, vests, clothes, masks.
Gloansy's was the vehicles, the work cars and the switch cars.
Doug was the planner, the architect, the author. He was also the worrier, the perfectionist, and the cautious one. The sober one, trusted for his sense of self-preservation.
The next few days found him being super careful, spying the can guards on different routes, unrelated to the movie theater, just getting the nuances of their routine down. Also, he needed to satisfy himself that they were not plants, not FBI agents playing guards, paranoid as he was that the G was onto them. He needed to be certain that these were real wage earners with families to go home to at night. So he cooped down the road from Pinnacle's vault facility-- at a safe distance from their cameras and fences; it was not unknown for these depots to hold eight figures on an overnight-- and eyeballed the passing cars, looking for the guards heading home. A plum Saturn coupe stopped his heart once, but it wore no
Breathe!
bumper sticker.
He spotted the guard with the white brush mustache behind the wheel of a blue Jeep Cherokee and fell in behind him, trailing the Jeep to Randolph, to a modest split-level near an elementary school. He watched the uniformed guard leaf through his mail in the driveway as a Toyota Camry pulled in behind, the wife returning home from work.
Doug watched the guy with his happy, broad-hipped wife, walking to his aging house and overgrown lawn, and saw all the things this guy had to lose. Casing a life was different now, post-Claire Keesey. But these same pangs of guilt gave him an idea, and suddenly he knew exactly how they were going to pull this job.
He got lost trying to get back out to I-93 and found himself stuck in downtown Canton, Claire Keesey's hometown. He drove past the high school, past leafy trees and widely spaced houses with pampered lawns, the evening becoming too pregnant with associations. He felt chased as he steered out fast for the highway, antsy about returning home. Instead, he detoured to The Braintree 10.
He circled the bottom of the hill first, below the complex. The twin screens of an old drive-in theater remained there, decomposing, the property now split between a driving range and the parking lot for park-and-fly shuttle service to Logan Airport. Near a row of batting cages was a road barred by steel swing gates, secured by a key lock and chain. Doug drove back up to the theater parking lot, finding the outlet there, also gated and locked, the unused road winding down the weedy hillside to the batting cages in an
S
. Both Forbes and Grandview were narrow, twin-lane roads, the parking lot a nightmare to get into or out of during weekend prime time, making the emergency road necessary. Its direct access set Doug's mind jumping again.
He went inside and bought a ticket like a citizen, then laid out another fin for a personal pan pizza. He killed time wandering around the wide lobby, spotting an office door marked No Admittance half-hidden behind a three-part
Independence Day
cardboard display showing the White House being blown to smithereens. On one wall was a framed portrait of the young manager, Mr. Cidro Kosario, thin-necked and smiling in an ill-fitting suit, alongside his welcome message and his signature endorsing General Cinemas' "Commitment to Theater Excellence."
An advance poster for
The Rock
-- an action movie about an old man who escaped from prison-- worked on Doug like an omen, scaring him into his theater. The last preview before
